Complete Idiot’s Guide To Exif Data In Photos

What is Exif Data?

Exif Data is meta data stored by camera’s while taking pictures. Exif contains precise information about the Camera model, lens, shutter, aperture, GPS location, exposure etc. details embedded in each photo taken on digital cameras. These details help those who are interested in knowing details of the photos and understand how photo was taken and the equipment details. These details are also used to know the authenticity of the photographer as well. You can put your name, contact details as a proof of one’s own work. All image viewers are capable of reading the Exif data and some even let you edit those details. Sometimes, editing date details, or adding photographers details in to the Exif data is desirable. How can one do that? Well, there are some tools to play with Exif data.

How to view Exif Data?

All image viewers let you see the Exif data. e.g. IrfanView for instance is a freeware tool and has lets of plugins to view Exif data. There are quite a few free picture viewers such as Picasa, Windows Live Photo, Paint.Net etc. can also be tried. If you want to try some online service, then check out, Jeffrey’s Exif Viewer. Just upload the image or provide the URL of the image and get the details right away. One more such online service is FindExif.

Can you edit Exif Data?

Yes, editing Exif data is possible. Tool such as EXIFUtils (not free but can run on Mac OS, Linux as well as Windows) could be used to edit Exif data. PhotoME is also another Free Exif Data editor. Ofcourse some fields cannot be edited. Picasa, Geosetter etc. tools can also do partial Exif editing. Commercial Power Exif editor is a professional Exif editor. Even Windows Vista, Windows 7 explorer can edit Exif data/ Just right click on the picture, open the details tab and you can easily edit the data.

How to remove Exif/Metadata altogether from Images?

Sometimes, it is necessary not to show metadata of your photos or files. In that case, we need to hide or remove Metadata embedded in the file. Windows explorer in Vista, Windows 7 do this trick quite easily. Just right click on the picture, open the details tab and you can easily delete the data by clicking on “remove properties and personal data”. Tools such as BatchPurifier (not free) can do this task easily. In Photoshop, save the image as Save for web and the Exif data gets stripped.

Easiest and free way to remove Exif data is by using IrfanView. Open the image and save as JPG and select “reset Exif orientation tag” as shown in the image below.

One comment

This tool is also an option to delete EXIF as well as other metadata from photos: http://www.superutils.com/products/exifcleaner/ It can remove in a batch mode, and without any picture data loss. Why don’t to mention also the well-known Exif Tool by Phil Harvey, as well as old good Exifer for Windows?